First Christmas

Time for recovery! We just got home today from a 5-day holiday visiting spree. We began the trip at Craig's parents' in Grand Rapids, where we celebrated Christmas Eve. The next day, we drove down to Chicago to celebrate the holiday with my parents and sister. We stayed with my family for the next few days, including a jaunt 2 hours north to Milwaukee to visit my dad's side of the family.



So many wonderful memories of Elizabeth's first Christmas. On Craig's side, Elizabeth has 3 older cousins (ages 5, 4, and 1.5), so the holiday for this group was a chaotic blur of flung wrapping paper, laughter, some crankiness, and of course lots and lots of toys. Elizabeth held her own so well with the excited older kids. She mostly just crawled around the living room taking in the action. Her oldest cousins just couldn't wait for E. to attempt to open her gifts, so "helped" her by ripping off the paper themselves, but E. didn't seem to notice the paper anyway.
With my side, she's the only grandchild so was the center of attention. Again, though, the gift opening did not really capture her attention--in this case, because it was upstaged by Elizabeth's discovery of my parents' staircase. She's never been on our stairs, but there they stood, right by the living room where we were opening gifts. I let her scale that mountain to see how she'd do, and she sped up those stairs (with me close behind), met by our cheers. Goofy little monkey!

The next few days were jam-packed with visits. I had to shed my uptightness and go with the flow with wonky naptimes and late bedtimes, but Elizabeth (and I) went with the flow pretty well. We spent the 26th with my dad's side of the family, a pretty large group which included my cousin's son Brayden who is 3 months younger than Elizabeth. The two babies stole the show the entire evening, and shared some good playtime (although Elizabeth did yank toys from Brayden on more than one occasion). It was fun to share parent stories with my cousin and his wife. It really hit me that I'm getting old. I have been to so many Christmas celebrations in that very house with that very group of people, for years and years, and now that I have my own daughter I noticed a distinct generational shift. My grandparents have passed away, so now my parents and aunts and uncles have become a new generation, and Elizabeth and Brayden have replaced the place my cousins and I have held for so many years as "the kids." It's times like these that floor me--I am an ADULT!!
The last two days of our trip were filled with visits to my high school friends and their kids. We all have kids more or less around the same age, and there are 7 kids among us now, so it gives us a perfect reason to get together. I feel so blessed that my dear friends and I have managed to reconnect so often in the 12 years since we dispersed after high school...and the days of bowling and bars has morphed into playdates at our houses or in the play area at the mall. Yikes!

This is the blueprint for what my daughter's earliest Christmas memories will be. It touches me when I think of how similar our holidays were to what I experienced growing up. Like Elizabeth, I grew up in a family in which most of our relatives lived out of town, so every year we made an extended trip packed with visits. The highlight for me was always the Christmas free-for-all with my cousins; the worst was living rooms of my parents' friends, where I entertained myself while they talked about boring adult stuff.

But this will be distinctly Elizabeth's story. Someday she will look back on the photos from Christmas 2010, her first, in complete wonder.

PICTURED ABOVE: Elizabeth and her cousins; with Aunt Katy; two daddies--Craig and Elizabeth with my cousin Jeff and his son Brayden.